Make Sure Our Help Really Helps...

As we’ve discussed leading up to this point, becoming an effective servant leader certainly involves exemplifying several specific characteristics but even those can be interpreted quite differently depending on the behavioral and communication style of the individual we’re attempting to serve! And whether we always like it or not, their perception is nearly always their reality!

Several years ago, not long before I really started digging into The Model of Human Behavior, I was working in a human resources role where part of my responsibility was ensuring that our team members were consistently held accountable for performing their required tasks. As I got to know each individual and learned more about their roles, I noticed some gaps in one particular department. There was more indirect labor (non-billable hours) per person in that department than any other and the quality issues seemed to be a bit higher than we were seeing in the other areas.

The supervisor of that department was (and still is) an outstanding guy! He had been offered the role several years prior because of his performance in the department, but to the best of my knowledge, he hadn’t been given any formal supervisory or management training. He was great in every technical aspect of the role and the people on the receiving end of any work he performed absolutely loved him. His team members were typically happy working for him too.

Now if you’ve ever heard me talk about employee engagement, you’ve likely heard me say a happy employee isn’t necessarily an engaged or productive employee but an engaged employee is a productive and almost always happy employee. That was exactly what I saw in this department. To me, it seemed like a few of the team members were walking all over the supervisor. And with what I learned soon after that was my highly DRIVEN approach to achieve results, I saw it as my responsibility to help him correct this! There was just one problem…

That supervisor was a relatively quiet guy and was very good at the intricate details of his work. He cared a lot for each person in his department. But my DIRECT approach to addressing the issues was something he viewed as confrontation. Based on what I’ve learned since, his primary behavioral style was extremely SUPPORTIVE; he was very Reserved and focused on ensuring that the People around him were taken care of.

My intent was to serve him and the organization as a whole by helping address the issues we had uncovered. My charge-hell-with-a-water-pistol approach to providing him with that service was perceived much differently than I had hoped…

I’ll spare you the rest of the story, but the lesson I learned there was that I just cannot treat everyone like I’d like to be treated and still be viewed as a servant leader. If we hope to provide effective servant leadership to this third primary behavioral style, which just happens to be the largest of the four at around 35% of the population, we’d do well to tone down our approach and make sure we’re showing sincere appreciation for them as well as the people they care about. If we need to address an issue, we need to be very intentional about isolating the specific issue and not devaluing any particular individual, and we need to be sure we’re doing it in a very private setting.

I hadn’t not taken that approach and I realized later on that my push to get results had actually alienated that supervisor, even though my goal was to help him. When we’re working to serve folks with this primary style, we need to slow down enough to make sure our help really helps…

Having looked at three-quarters of folks we’ll likely deal with on any given day, we have one more primary style to consider when we’re working to provide effective servant leadership. Serving that style will require us to focus more on attention to detail and will work through that next...